Have you ever felt your voice and creativity stifled by dominant culture? Excluded because of the way you think, desire, feel, or look? Have you felt that your ambitions and visions, your language and interests are not the same as those around you? Every culture and society has its own set of spoken and unspoken rules of etiquette that people are expected to follow. From birth, we are taught what is considered polite or improper behaviour. Often, what is labelled as ‘bad manners’ serves as a tool to enforce conformity within a society and as a result, those who do not conform are discriminated against and may suffer from the imposition of uniform social norms. This workshop aims to explore and activate that suppressed voice and guide writers towards a practice that is free of normative restraints. Reading excerpts, engaging in discussion, and working through writing exercises, participants are invited to explore together the power and freedom of writing outside of standard or traditional styles and genres. 

The workshop Bad Manners: Writing as though Culture Isn’t Looking is hosted by Lubi Barre as part of Middle Ground: Hargeysa International Bookfair. Barre is passionate about writing beyond restrictive boundaries and challenging dominant narratives that repress individuality. She seeks to subvert these so-called bad manners to empower people to express their true selves.

The Middle Ground workshops offer the possibility to deepen one’s own writing practice and to be in exchange with other authors about issues around writing. Participants from all age groups, whether amateur writers, professionals, or literary scholars, are invited to join. 

To register: please submit a short text (fiction, non-fiction, poetry) of 500 words max., indicating the workshop you wish to register for in the subject line, to middleground@hkw.de.

The deadline for submissions is 18.9.2024. As places are limited, selected participants will be contacted no later than 21.9.2024.